French poet, essayist, critic, and editor, chief promoter and one of the
founders of the Surrealist movement.

As a medical student, Breton was interested in mental illness; his reading
of the works of Sigmund Freud (whom he met in 1921) introduced him to the
concept of the unconscious. Influenced by psychiatry and Symbolist poetry,
he joined the Dadaists. In 1919 with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault,
he cofounded the review Littérature; in its pages, Breton and Soupault
published “Les Champs magnétiques” (1920; “Magnetic Fields”), the first
example of the Surrealist technique of automatic writing. In 1924 Breton's
Manifeste du surréalisme defined Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism,
by which it is intended to express . . . the real process of thought. It
is the dictation of thought, free from any control by the reason and of
any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.” Surrealism aimed to eliminate the
distinction between dream and reality, reason and madness, objectivity and
subjectivity. Breton's novel Nadja (1928) merged everyday occurrences with
psychological aberrations. L'Immaculée Conception (1930), written with
Paul Éluard, attempted to convey a verbal impression of different types of
mental disorder. Les Vases communicants (1932; “The Communicating
Vessels”) and L'Amour fou (1937; “Mad Love”) explored the connection
between dream and reality. Breton also wrote theoretical and critical
works, including Les Pas perdus (1924; “The Lost Steps”), Légitime Défense
(1926; “Legitimate Defense”), Le Surréalisme et le peinture (1926;
“Surrealism and Painting”),Qu'est-ce que le sur réa lisme? (1934; What is
Surrealism?), and La Clé des champs (1953; “The Key to the Fields”).

The Surrealist movement eventually became politically involved in the
ferment of the 1930s, and Breton and several colleagues joined the
Communist Party. His second Surrealist manifesto, published in 1930,
explored the philosophical implications of Surrealism. Breton broke with
the Communist Party in 1935 but remained committed to Marxist ideals.
During the German occupation of France, Breton escaped to the United
States. In 1942 at Yale University he organized a Surrealist exposition
and issued yet another Surrealist manifesto. In 1946 Breton returned to
France, where, the following year, he produced another Surrealist
exhibition. His Poèmes appeared in 1948 in Paris, and Selected Poems was
published in London in 1969.

contents:Manifesto of Surrealism

*

What is Surrealism?

Man RayPortrait of Andre Breton1931

Manifesto of Surrealism

1924

So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life--real
life, I mean--that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate
dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the
objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought
his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always
through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not
refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he
feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs
he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty,
in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval of his
conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still
retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his
childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still
strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known
restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once;
this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested
in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each
day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst
material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never
sleep.

But it is true that we would not dare venture so far, it is not merely
a question of distance. Threat is piled upon threat, one yields, abandons
a portion of the terrain to be conquered. This imagination which knows no
bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance
with the laws of an arbitrary utility; it is incapable of assuming this
inferior role for very long and, in the vicinity of the twentieth year,
generally prefers to abandon man to his lusterless fate.

Though he may later try to pull himself together on occasion, having
felt that he is losing by slow degrees all reason for living, incapable as
he has become of being able to rise to some exceptional situation such as
love, he will hardly succeed. This is because he henceforth belongs body
and soul to an imperative practical necessity which demands his constant
attention. None of his gestures will be expansive, none of his ideas
generous or far-reaching. In his minds eye, events real or imagined will
be seen only as they relate to a welter of similar events, events in which
he has not participated, abortive events. What am I saying: he will
judge them in relationship to one of these events whose consequences are
more reassuring than the others. On no account will he view them as his
salvation.

Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.

There remains madness, "the madness that one locks up," as it has aptly
been described. That madness or another.... We all know, in fact, that the
insane owe their incarceration to a tiny number of legally reprehensible
acts and that, were it not for these acts their freedom (or what we see as
their freedom) would not be threatened. I am willing to admit that they
are, to some degree, victims of their imagination, in that it induces them
not to pay attention to certain rules--outside of which the species feels
threatened--which we are all supposed to know and respect. But their
profound indifference to the way in which we judge them, and even to the
various punishments meted out to them, allows us to suppose that they
derive a great deal of comfort and consolation from their imagination,
that they enjoy their madness sufficiently to endure the thought that its
validity does not extend beyond themselves. And, indeed, hallucinations,
illusions, etc., are not a source of trifling pleasure. The best
controlled sensuality partakes of it, and I know that there are many
evenings when I would gladly that pretty hand which, during the last pages
of Taines LIntelligence, indulges in some curious misdeeds. I could
spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people
are honest to a fault, and their naiveté has no peer but my own.
Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a
boatload of madmen. And note how this madness has taken shape, and
endured.

It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of
imagination furled.

The case against the realistic attitude demands to be examined,
following the case against the materialistic attitude. The latter, more
poetic in fact than the former, admittedly implies on the part of man a
kind of monstrous pride which, admittedly, is monstrous, but not a new and
more complete decay. It should above all be viewed as a welcome reaction
against certain ridiculous tendencies of spiritualism. Finally, it is not
incompatible with a certain nobility of thought.

By contrast, the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint
Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any
intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of
mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives
birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly
feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both
science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity
bordering on stupidity, a dogs life. The activity of the best minds feels
the effects of it; the law of the lowest common denominator finally
prevails upon them as it does upon the others. An amusing result of this
state of affairs, in literature for example, is the generous supply of
novels. Each person adds his personal little "observation" to the whole.
As a cleansing antidote to all this, M. Paul Valéry recently suggested
that an anthology be compiled in which the largest possible number of
opening passages from novels be offered; the resulting insanity, he
predicted, would be a source of considerable edification. The most famous
authors would be included. Such a though reflects great credit on Paul
Valéry who, some time ago, speaking of novels, assured me that, so far as
he was concerned, he would continue to refrain from writing: "The Marquise
went out at five." But has he kept his word?

If the purely informative style, of which the sentence just quoted is a
prime example, is virtually the rule rather than the exception in the
novel form, it is because, in all fairness, the authors ambition is
severely circumscribed. The circumstantial, needlessly specific nature of
each of their notations leads me to believe that they are perpetrating a
joke at my expense. I am spared not even one of the characters slightest
vacillations: will he be fairhaired? what will his name be? will we first
meet him during the summer? So many questions resolved once and for all,
as chance directs; the only discretionary power left me is to close the
book, which I am careful to do somewhere in the vicinity of the first
page. And the descriptions! There is nothing to which their vacuity can be
compared; they are nothing but so many superimposed images taken from some
stock catalogue, which the author utilizes more and more whenever he
chooses; he seizes the opportunity to slip me his postcards, he tries to
make me agree with him about the clichés:

The small room into which the young man was shown was covered with
yellow wallpaper: there were geraniums in the windows, which were covered
with muslin curtains; the setting sun cast a harsh light over the entire
setting.... There was nothing special about the room. The furniture, of
yellow wood, was all very old. A sofa with a tall back turned down, an
oval table opposite the sofa, a dressing table and a mirror set against
the pierglass, some chairs along the walls, two or three etchings of no
value portraying some German girls with birds in their hands--such were
the furnishings. (Dostoevski, Crime and Punishment)

I am in no mood to admit that the mind is interested in occupying
itself with such matters, even fleetingly. It may be argued that this
school-boy description has its place, and that at this juncture of the
book the author has his reasons for burdening me. Nevertheless he is
wasting his time, for I refuse to go into his room. Others laziness or
fatigue does not interest me. I have too unstable a notion of the
continuity of life to equate or compare my moments of depression or
weakness with my best moments. When one ceases to feel, I am of the
opinion one should keep quiet. And I would like it understood that I am
not accusing or condemning lack of originality as such. I am only
saying that I do not take particular note of the empty moments of my life,
that it may be unworthy for any man to crystallize those which seem to him
to be so. I shall, with your permission, ignore the description of
that room, and many more like it.

Not so fast, there; Im getting into the area of psychology, a subject
about which I shall be careful not to joke.

The author attacks a character and, this being settled upon, parades
his hero to and fro across the world. No matter what happens, this hero,
whose actions and reactions are admirably predictable, is compelled not to
thwart or upset--even though he looks as though he is--the calculations of
which he is the object. The currents of life can appear to lift him up,
roll him over, cast him down, he will still belong to this readymade
human type. A simple game of chess which doesn't interest me in the
least--man, whoever he may be, being for me a mediocre opponent. What I
cannot bear are those wretched discussions relative to such and such a
move, since winning or losing is not in question. And if the game is not
worth the candle, if objective reason does a frightful job--as indeed it
does--of serving him who calls upon it, is it not fitting and proper to
avoid all contact with these categories? "Diversity is so vast that every
different tone of voice, every step, cough, every wipe of the nose, every
sneeze...."* (Pascal.) If in a cluster of grapes there are no two alike,
why do you want me to describe this grape by the other, by all the others,
why do you want me to make a palatable grape? Our brains are dulled by the
incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable. The
desire for analysis wins out over the sentiments.** (Barrès, Proust.)
The result is statements of undue length whose persuasive power is
attributable solely to their strangeness and which impress the reader only
by the abstract quality of their vocabulary, which moreover is
ill-defined. If the general ideas that philosophy has thus far come up
with as topics of discussion revealed by their very nature their
definitive incursion into a broader or more general area. I would be the
first to greet the news with joy. But up till now it has been nothing but
idle repartee; the flashes of wit and other niceties vie in concealing
from us the true thought in search of itself, instead of concentrating on
obtaining successes. It seems to me that every act is its own
justification, at least for the person who has been capable of committing
it, that it is endowed with a radiant power which the slightest gloss is
certain to diminish. Because of this gloss, it even in a sense ceases to
happen. It gains nothing to be thus distinguished. Stendhal's heroes are
subject to the comments and appraisals--appraisals which are more or less
successful--made by that author, which add not one whit to their glory.
Where we really find them again is at the point at which Stendahl has lost
them.

We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what
I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are
applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute
rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts
relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape
us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself
increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which
it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support
on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the
sentinels of common sense. Under the pretense of civilization and
progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may
rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind
of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices.
It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which
we pretended not to be concerned with any longer--and, in my opinion by
far the most important part--has been brought back to light. For this we
must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. On the basis of
these discoveries a current of opinion is finally forming by means of
which the human explorer will be able to carry his investigation much
further, authorized as he will henceforth be not to confine himself solely
to the most summary realities. The imagination is perhaps on the point of
reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our mind
contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the
surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every
reason to seize them--first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit
them to the control of our reason. The analysts themselves have everything
to gain by it. But it is worth noting that no means has been designated a
priori for carrying out this undertaking, that until further notice it can
be construed to be the province of poets as well as scholars, and that its
success is not dependent upon the more or less capricious paths that will
be followed.

Freud very rightly brought his critical faculties to bear upon the
dream. It is, in fact, inadmissible that this considerable portion of
psychic activity (since, at least from man's birth until his death,
thought offers no solution of continuity, the sum of the moments of the
dream, from the point of view of time, and taking into consideration only
the time of pure dreaming, that is the dreams of sleep, is not inferior to
the sum of the moments of reality, or, to be more precisely limiting, the
moments of waking) has still today been so grossly neglected. I have
always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more
credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to
those occurring in dreams. It is because man, when he ceases to sleep, is
above all the plaything of his memory, and in its normal state memory
takes pleasure in weakly retracing for him the circumstances of the dream,
in stripping it of any real importance, and in dismissing the only
determinant from the point where he thinks he has left it a few hours
before: this firm hope, this concern. He is under the impression of
continuing something that is worthwhile. Thus the dream finds itself
reduced to a mere parenthesis, as is the night. And, like the night,
dreams generally contribute little to furthering our understanding. This
curious state of affairs seems to me to call for certain reflections:

1) Within the limits where they operate (or are thought to operate)
dreams give every evidence of being continuous and show signs of
organization. Memory alone arrogates to itself the right to excerpt from
dreams, to ignore the transitions, and to depict for us rather a series of
dreams than the dream itself. By the same token, at any given
moment we have only a distinct notion of realities, the coordination of
which is a question of will.* (Account must be taken of the depth
of the dream. For the most part I retain only what I can glean from its
most superficial layers. What I most enjoy contemplating about a dream is
everything that sinks back below the surface in a waking state, everything
I have forgotten about my activities in the course of the preceding day,
dark foliage, stupid branches. In "reality," likewise, I prefer to
fall.) What is worth noting is that nothing allows us to presuppose a
greater dissipation of the elements of which the dream is constituted. I
am sorry to have to speak about it according to a formula which in
principle excludes the dream. When will we have sleeping logicians,
sleeping philosophers? I would like to sleep, in order to surrender myself
to the dreamers, the way I surrender myself to those who read me with eyes
wide open; in order to stop imposing, in this realm, the conscious rhythm
of my thought. Perhaps my dream last night follows that of the night
before, and will be continued the next night, with an exemplary
strictness. It's quite possible, as the saying goes. And since it
has not been proved in the slightest that, in doing so, the "reality" with
which I am kept busy continues to exist in the state of dream, that it
does not sink back down into the immemorial, why should I not grant to
dreams what I occasionally refuse reality, that is, this value of
certainty in itself which, in its own time, is not open to my repudiation?
Why should I not expect from the sign of the dream more than I expect from
a degree of consciousness which is daily more acute? Can't the dream also
be used in solving the fundamental questions of life? Are these questions
the same in one case as in the other and, in the dream, do these questions
already exist? Is the dream any less restrictive or punitive than the
rest? I am growing old and, more than that reality to which I believe I
subject myself, it is perhaps the dream, the difference with which I treat
the dream, which makes me grow old.

2) Let me come back again to the waking state. I have no choice but to
consider it a phenomenon of interference. Not only does the mind display,
in this state, a strange tendency to lose its bearings (as evidenced by
the slips and mistakes the secrets of which are just beginning to be
revealed to us), but, what is more, it does not appear that, when the mind
is functioning normally, it really responds to anything but the
suggestions which come to it from the depths of that dark night to which I
commend it. However conditioned it may be, its balance is relative. It
scarcely dares express itself and, if it does, it confines itself to
verifying that such and such an idea, or such and such a woman, has made
an impression on it. What impression it would be hard pressed to say, by
which it reveals the degree of its subjectivity, and nothing more. This
idea, this woman, disturb it, they tend to make it less severe. What they
do is isolate the mind for a second from its solvent and spirit it to
heaven, as the beautiful precipitate it can be, that it is. When all else
fails, it then calls upon chance, a divinity even more obscure than the
others to whom it ascribes all its aberrations. Who can say to me that the
angle by which that idea which affects it is offered, that what it likes
in the eye of that woman is not precisely what links it to its dream,
binds it to those fundamental facts which, through its own fault, it has
lost? And if things were different, what might it be capable of? I would
like to provide it with the key to this corridor.

3) The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to
him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill,
fly faster, love to your heart's content. And if you should die, are you
not certain of reawaking among the dead? Let yourself be carried along,
events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of
everything is priceless.

What reason, I ask, a reason so much vaster than the other, makes
dreams seem so natural and allows me to welcome unreservedly a welter of
episodes so strange that they could confound me now as I write? And yet I
can believe my eyes, my ears; this great day has arrived, this beast has
spoken.

If man's awaking is harder, if it breaks the spell too abruptly, it is
because he has been led to make for himself too impoverished a notion of
atonement.

4) From the moment when it is subjected to a methodical examination,
when, by means yet to be determined, we succeed in recording the contents
of dreams in their entirety (and that presupposes a discipline of memory
spanning generations; but let us nonetheless begin by noting the most
salient facts), when its graph will expand with unparalleled volume and
regularity, we may hope that the mysteries which really are not will give
way to the great Mystery. I believe in the future resolution of these two
states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a
kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is
in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but
too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys
of its possession.

A story is told according to which Saint-Pol-Roux, in times gone by,
used to have a notice posted on the door of his manor house in Camaret,
every evening before he went to sleep, which read: THE POET IS WORKING.

A great deal more could be said, but in passing I merely wanted to
touch upon a subject which in itself would require a very long and much
more detailed discussion; I shall come back to it. At this juncture, my
intention was merely to mark a point by noting the hate of the
marvelous which rages in certain men, this absurdity beneath which
they try to bury it. Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always
beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is
beautiful.

In the realm of literature, only the marvelous is capable of
fecundating works which belong to an inferior category such as the novel,
and generally speaking, anything that involves storytelling. Lewis' The
Monk is an admirable proof of this. It is infused throughout with the
presence of the marvelous. Long before the author has freed his main
characters from all temporal constraints, one feels them ready to act with
an unprecedented pride. This passion for eternity with which they are
constantly stirred lends an unforgettable intensity to their torments, and
to mine. I mean that this book, from beginning to end, and in the purest
way imaginable, exercises an exalting effect only upon that part of the
mind which aspires to leave the earth and that, stripped of an
insignificant part of its plot, which belongs to the period in which it
was written, it constitutes a paragon of precision and innocent grandeur.*
(What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything
fantastic: there is only the real.) It seems to me none better has been
done, and that the character of Mathilda in particular is the most moving
creation that one can credit to this figurative fashion in
literature. She is less a character than a continual temptation. And if a
character is not a temptation, what is he? An extreme temptation, she. In
The Monk the "nothing is impossible for him who dares try" gives it
its full, convincing measure. Ghosts play a logical role in the book,
since the critical mind does not seize them in order to dispute them.
Ambrosio's punishment is likewise treated in a legitimate manner, since it
is finally accepted by the critical faculty as a natural denouement.

It may seem arbitrary on my part, when discussing the marvelous, to
choose this model, from which both the Nordic literatures and Oriental
literatures have borrowed time and time again, not to mention the
religious literatures of every country. This is because most of the
examples which these literatures could have furnished me with are tainted
by puerility, for the simple reason that they are addressed to children.
At an early age children are weaned on the marvelous, and later on they
fail to retain a sufficient virginity of mind to thoroughly enjoy fairy
tales. No matter how charming they may be, a grown man would think he were
reverting to childhood by nourishing himself on fairy tales, and I am the
first to admit that all such tales are not suitable for him. The fabric of
adorable improbabilities must be made a trifle more subtle the older we
grow, and we are still at the age of waiting for this kind of spider....
But the faculties do not change radically. Fear, the attraction of the
unusual, chance, the taste for things extravagant are all devices which we
can always call upon without fear of deception. There are fairy tales to
be written for adults, fairy tales still almost blue.

The marvelous is not the same in every period of history: it partakes
in some obscure way of a sort of general revelation only the fragments of
which come down to us: they are the romantic ruins, the modern
mannequin, or any other symbol capable of affecting the human
sensibility for a period of time. In these areas which make us smile,
there is still portrayed the incurable human restlessness, and this is why
I take them into consideration and why I judge them inseparable from
certain productions of genius which are, more than the others, painfully
afflicted by them. They are Villon's gibbets, Racine's Greeks,
Baudelaire's couches. They coincide with an eclipse of the taste I am made
to endure, I whose notion of taste is the image of a big spot. Amid the
bad taste of my time I strive to go further than anyone else. It would
have been I, had I lived in 1820, I "the bleeding nun," I who would not
have spared this cunning and banal "let us conceal" whereof the parodical
Cuisin speaks, it would have been I, I who would have reveled in the
enormous metaphors, as he says, all phases of the "silver disk." For today
I think of a castle, half of which is not necessarily in ruins;
this castle belongs to me, I picture it in a rustic setting, not far from
Paris. The outbuildings are too numerous to mention, and, as for the
interior, it has been frightfully restored, in such manner as to leave
nothing to be desired from the viewpoint of comfort. Automobiles are
parked before the door, concealed by the shade of trees. A few of my
friends are living here as permanent guests: there is Louis Aragon
leaving; he only has time enough to say hello; Philippe Soupault gets up
with the stars, and Paul Eluard, our great Eluard, has not yet come home.
There are Robert Desnos and Roger Vitrac out on the grounds poring over an
ancient edict on duelling; Georges Auric, Jean Paulhan; Max Morise, who
rows so well, and Benjamin Péret, busy with his equations with birds; and
Joseph Delteil; and Jean Carrive; and Georges Limbour, and Georges
Limbours (there is a whole hedge of Georges Limbours); and Marcel Noll;
there is T. Fraenkel waving to us from his captive balloon, Georges
Malkine, Antonin Artaud, Francis Gérard, Pierre Naville, J.-A. Boiffard,
and after them Jacques Baron and his brother, handsome and cordial, and so
many others besides, and gorgeous women, I might add. Nothing is too good
for these young men, their wishes are, as to wealth, so many commands.
Francis Picabia comes to pay us a call, and last week, in the hall of
mirrors, we received a certain Marcel Duchamp whom we had not hitherto
known. Picasso goes hunting in the neighborhood. The spirit of
demoralization has elected domicile in the castle, and it is with it
we have to deal every time it is a question of contact with our fellowmen,
but the doors are always open, and one does not begin by "thanking"
everyone, you know. Moreover, the solitude is vast, we don't often run
into one another. And anyway, isn't what matters that we be the masters of
ourselves, the masters of women, and of love too?

I shall be proved guilty of poetic dishonesty: everyone will go
parading about saying that I live on the rue Fontaine and that he will
have none of the water that flows therefrom. To be sure! But is he certain
that this castle into which I cordially invite him is an image? What if
this castle really existed! My guests are there to prove it does; their
whim is the luminous road that leads to it. We really live by our
fantasies when we give free reign to them. And how could what one
might do bother the other, there, safely sheltered from the sentimental
pursuit and at the trysting place of opportunities?

Man proposes and disposes. He and he alone can determine whether he is
completely master of himself, that is, whether he maintains the body of
his desires, daily more formidable, in a state of anarchy. Poetry teaches
him to. It bears within itself the perfect compensation for the miseries
we endure. It can also be an organizer, if ever, as the result of a less
intimate disappointment, we contemplate taking it seriously. The time is
coming when it decrees the end of money and by itself will break the bread
of heaven for the earth! There will still be gatherings on the public
squares, and movements you never dared hope participate in.
Farewell to absurd choices, the dreams of dark abyss, rivalries, the
prolonged patience, the flight of the seasons, the artificial order of
ideas, the ramp of danger, time for everything! May you only take the
trouble to practice poetry. Is it not incumbent upon us, who are
already living off it, to try and impose what we hold to be our case for
further inquiry?

It matters not whether there is a certain disproportion between this
defense and the illustration that will follow it. It was a question of
going back to the sources of poetic imagination and, what is more, of
remaining there. Not that I pretend to have done so. It requires a great
deal of fortitude to try to set up one's abode in these distant regions
where everything seems at first to be so awkward and difficult, all the
more so if one wants to try to take someone there. Besides, one is never
sure of really being there. If one is going to all that trouble, one might
as well stop off somewhere else. Be that as it may, the fact is that the
way to these regions is clearly marked, and that to attain the true goal
is now merely a matter of the travelers' ability to endure.

We are all more or less aware of the road traveled. I was careful to
relate, in the course of a study of the case of Robert Desnos entitled
ENTRÉE DES MÉDIUMS,* (See Les Pas perdus, published by N.R.F.) that
I had been led to" concentrate my attention on the more or less partial
sentences which, when one is quite alone and on the verge of falling
asleep, become perceptible for the mind without its being possible to
discover what provoked them." I had then just attempted the poetic
adventure with the minimum of risks, that is, my aspirations were the same
as they are today but I trusted in the slowness of formulation to keep me
from useless contacts, contacts of which I completely disapproved. This
attitude involved a modesty of thought certain vestiges of which I still
retain. At the end of my life, I shall doubtless manage to speak with
great effort the way people speak, to apologize for my voice and my few
remaining gestures. The virtue of the spoken word (and the written word
all the more so) seemed to me to derive from the faculty of foreshortening
in a striking manner the exposition (since there was exposition) of a
small number of facts, poetic or other, of which I made myself the
substance. I had come to the conclusion that Rimbaud had not proceeded any
differently. I was composing, with a concern for variety that deserved
better, the final poems of Mont de piété, that is, I managed to
extract from the blank lines of this book an incredible advantage. These
lines were the closed eye to the operations of thought that I believed I
was obliged to keep hidden from the reader. It was not deceit on my part,
but my love of shocking the reader. I had the illusion of a possible
complicity, which I had more and more difficulty giving up. I had begun to
cherish words excessively for the space they allow around them, for their
tangencies with countless other words which I did not utter. The poem
BLACK FOREST derives precisely from this state of mind. It took me six
months to write it, and you may take my word for it that I did not rest a
single day. But this stemmed from the opinion I had of myself in those
days, which was high, please don't judge me too harshly. I enjoy these
stupid confessions. At that point cubist pseudo-poetry was trying to get a
foothold, but it had emerged defenseless from Picasso's brain, and I was
thought to be as dull as dishwater (and still am). I had a sneaking
suspicion, moreover, that from the viewpoint of poetry I was off on the
wrong road, but I hedged my bet as best I could, defying lyricism with
salvos of definitions and formulas (the Dada phenomena were waiting in the
wings, ready to come on stage) and pretending to search for an application
of poetry to advertising (I went so far as to claim that the world would
end, not with a good book but with a beautiful advertisement for heaven or
for hell).

In those days, a man at least as boring as I, Pierre Reverdy, was
writing:

The image is a pure creation of the mind.

It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two
more or less distant realities.

The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is
distant and true, the stronger the image will be--the greater its
emotional power and poetic reality...* (Nord-Sud, March 1918)

These words, however sibylline for the uninitiated, were extremely
revealing, and I pondered them for a long time. But the image eluded me.
Reverdy's aesthetic, a completely a posteriori aesthetic, led me to
mistake the effects for the causes. It was in the midst of all this that I
renounced irrevocably my point of view.

One evening, therefore, before I fell asleep, I perceived, so clearly
articulated that it was impossible to change a word, but nonetheless
removed from the sound of any voice, a rather strange phrase which came to
me without any apparent relationship to the events in which, my
consciousness agrees, I was then involved, a phrase which seemed to me
insistent, a phrase, if I may be so bold, which was knocking at the
window. I took cursory note of it and prepared to move on when its
organic character caught my attention. Actually, this phrase astonished
me: unfortunately I cannot remember it exactly, but it was something like:
"There is a man cut in two by the window," but there could be no question
of ambiguity, accompanied as it was by the faint visual image* (Were I a
painter, this visual depiction would doubtless have become more important
for me than the other. It was most certainly my previous predispositions
which decided the matter. Since that day, I have had occasion to
concentrate my attention voluntarily on similar apparitions, and I know
they are fully as clear as auditory phenomena. With a pencil and white
sheet of paper to hand, I could easily trace their outlines. Here again it
is not a matter of drawing, but simply of tracing. I could thus
depict a tree, a wave, a musical instrument, all manner of things of which
I am presently incapable of providing even the roughest sketch. I would
plunge into it, convinced that I would find my way again, in a maze of
lines which at first glance would seem to be going nowhere. And, upon
opening my eyes, I would get the very strong impression of something
"never seen." The proof of what I am saying has been provided many times
by Robert Desnos: to be convinced, one has only to leaf through the pages
of issue number 36 of Feuilles libres which contains several of his
drawings (Romeo and Juliet, A Man Died This Morning, etc.) which
were taken by this magazine as the drawings of a madman and published as
such.) of a man walking cut half way up by a window perpendicular to the
axis of his body. Beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt, what I saw was
the simple reconstruction in space of a man leaning out a window. But this
window having shifted with the man, I realized that I was dealing with an
image of a fairly rare sort, and all I could think of was to incorporate
it into my material for poetic construction. No sooner had I granted it
this capacity than it was in fact succeeded by a whole series of phrases,
with only brief pauses between them, which surprised me only slightly less
and left me with the impression of their being so gratuitous that the
control I had then exercised upon myself seemed to me illusory and all I
could think of was putting an end to the interminable quarrel raging
within me.* (Knut Hamsum ascribes this sort of revelation to which I had
been subjected as deriving from hunger, and he may not be wrong.
(The fact is I did not eat every day during that period of my life). Most
certainly the manifestations that he describes in these terms are clearly
the same:

"The following day I awoke at an early hour. It was still dark. My eyes
had been open for a long time when I heard the clock in the apartment
above strike five. I wanted to go back to sleep, but I couldn't; I was
wide awake and a thousand thoughts were crowding through my mind.

"Suddenly a few good fragments came to mind, quite suitable to be used
in a rough draft, or serialized; all of a sudden I found, quite by chance,
beautiful phrases, phrases such as I had never written. I repeated them to
myself slowly, word by word; they were excellent. And there were still
more coming. I got up and picked up a pencil and some paper that were on a
table behind my bed. It was as though some vein had burst within me, one
word followed another, found its proper place, adapted itself to the
situation, scene piled upon scene, the action unfolded, one retort after
another welled up in my mind, I was enjoying myself immensely. Thoughts
came to me so rapidly and continued to flow so abundantly that I lost a
whole host of delicate details, because my pencil could not keep up with
them, and yet I went as fast as I could, my hand in constant motion, I did
not lose a minute. The sentences continued to well up within me, I was
pregnant with my subject."

Apollinaire asserted that Chirico's first paintings were done under the
influence of cenesthesic disorders (migraines, colics, etc.).)

Completely occupied as I still was with Freud at that time, and
familiar as I was with his methods of examination which I had some slight
occasion to use on some patients during the war, I resolved to obtain from
myself what we were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologue spoken
as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of the
critical faculties, a monologue consequently unencumbered by the slightest
inhibition and which was, as closely as possible, akin to spoken
thought. It had seemed to me, and still does--the way in which the
phrase about the man cut in two had come to me is an indication of
it--that the speed of thought is no greater than the speed of speech, and
that thought does not necessarily defy language, nor even the fast-moving
pen. It was in this frame of mind that Philippe Soupault--to whom I had
confided these initial conclusions--and I decided to blacken some paper,
with a praiseworthy disdain for what might result from a literary point of
view. The ease of execution did the rest. By the end of the first day we
were able to read to ourselves some fifty or so pages obtained in this
manner, and begin to compare our results. All in all, Soupault's pages and
mine proved to be remarkably similar: the same overconstruction,
shortcomings of a similar nature, but also, on both our parts, the
illusion of an extraordinary verve, a great deal of emotion, a
considerable choice of images of a quality such that we would not have
been capable of preparing a single one in longhand, a very special
picturesque quality and, here and there, a strong comical effect. The only
difference between our two texts seemed to me to derive essentially from
our respective tempers. Soupault's being less static than mine, and, if he
does not mind my offering this one slight criticism, from the fact that he
had made the error of putting a few words by way of titles at the top of
certain pages, I suppose in a spirit of mystification. On the other hand,
I must give credit where credit is due and say that he constantly and
vigorously opposed any effort to retouch or correct, however slightly, any
passage of this kind which seemed to me unfortunate. In this he was, to be
sure, absolutely right.* (I believe more and more in the infallibility of
my thought with respect to myself, and this is too fair. Nonetheless, with
this thought-writing, where one is at the mercy of the first
outside distraction, "ebullutions" can occur. It would be inexcusable for
us to pretend otherwise. By definition, thought is strong, and incapable
of catching itself in error. The blame for these obvious weaknesses must
be placed on suggestions that come to it from without.) It is, in fact,
difficult to appreciate fairly the various elements present: one may even
go so far as to say that it is impossible to appreciate them at a first
reading. To you who write, these elements are, on the surface, as
strange to you as they are to anyone else, and naturally you are wary
of them. Poetically speaking, what strikes you about them above all is
their extreme degree of immediate absurdity, the quality of this
absurdity, upon closer scrutiny, being to give way to everything
admissible, everything legitimate in the world: the disclosure of a
certain number of properties and of facts no less objective, in the final
analysis, than the others.

In homage to Guillaume Apollinaire, who had just died and who, on
several occasions, seemed to us to have followed a discipline of this
kind, without however having sacrificed to it any mediocre literary means,
Soupault and I baptized the new mode of pure expression which we had at
our disposal and which we wished to pass on to our friends, by the name of
SURREALISM. I believe that there is no point today in dwelling any further
on this word and that the meaning we gave it initially has generally
prevailed over its Apollinarian sense. To be even fairer, we could
probably have taken over the word SUPERNATURALISM employed by Gérard de
Nerval in his dedication to the Filles de feu.* (And also by Thomas
Carlyle in Sartor Resartus ([Book III] Chapter VIII, "Natural
Supernaturalism"), 1833-34.) It appears, in fact, that Nerval possessed to
a tee the spirit with which we claim a kinship, Apollinaire having
possessed, on the contrary, naught but the letter, still imperfect,
of Surrealism, having shown himself powerless to give a valid theoretical
idea of it. Here are two passages by Nerval which seem to me to be
extremely significant in this respect:

I am going to explain to you, my dear Dumas, the phenomenon of which
you have spoken a short while ago. There are, as you know, certain
storytellers who cannot invent without identifying with the characters
their imagination has dreamt up. You may recall how convincingly our old
friend Nodier used to tell how it had been his misfortune during the
Revolution to be guillotined; one became so completely convinced of what
he was saying that one began to wonder how he had managed to have his head
glued back on.

...And since you have been indiscreet enough to quote one of the
sonnets composed in this SUPERNATURALISTIC dream-state, as the Germans
would call it, you will have to hear them all. You will find them at the
end of the volume. They are hardly any more obscure than Hegel's
metaphysics or Swedenborg's MEMORABILIA, and would lose their charm if
they were explained, if such were possible; at least admit the worth of
the expression....** (See also L'Idéoréalisme by Saint-Pol-Roux.)

Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the
very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest,
for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came
along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which
one proposes to express--verbally, by means of the written word, or in any
other manner--the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought,
in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any
aesthetic or moral concern.

ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in
the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected
associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of
thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms
and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of
life. The following have performed acts of ABSOLUTE SURREALISM: Messrs.
Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive, Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Eluard,
Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville, Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault,
Vitrac.

They seem to be, up to the present time, the only ones, and there would
be no ambiguity about it were it not for the case of Isidore Ducasse,
about whom I lack information. And, of course, if one is to judge them
only superficially by their results, a good number of poets could pass for
Surrealists, beginning with Dante and, in his finer moments, Shakespeare.
In the course of the various attempts I have made to reduce what is, by
breach of trust, called genius, I have found nothing which in the final
analysis can be attributed to any other method than that.

Young's Nights are Surrealist from one end to the other;
unfortunately it is a priest who is speaking, a bad priest no doubt, but a
priest nonetheless.

Swift is Surrealist in malice,

Sade is Surrealist in sadism.

Chateaubriand is Surrealist in exoticism.

Constant is Surrealist in politics.

Hugo is Surrealist when he isn't stupid.

Desbordes-Valmore is Surrealist in love.

Bertrand is Surrealist in the past.

Rabbe is Surrealist in death.

Poe is Surrealist in adventure.

Baudelaire is Surrealist in morality.

Rimbaud is Surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere.

Mallarmé is Surrealist when he is confiding.

Jarry is Surrealist in absinthe.

Nouveau is Surrealist in the kiss.

Saint-Pol-Roux is Surrealist in his use of symbols.

Fargue is Surrealist in the atmosphere.

Vaché is Surrealist in me.

Reverdy is Surrealist at home.

Saint-Jean-Perse is Surrealist at a distance.

Roussel is Surrealist as a storyteller.

Etc.

I would like to stress the point: they are not always Surrealists, in
that I discern in each of them a certain number of preconceived ideas to
which--very naively!--they hold. They hold to them because they had not
heard the Surrealist voice, the one that continues to preach on the
eve of death and above the storms, because they did not want to serve
simply to orchestrate the marvelous score. They were instruments too full
of pride, and this is why they have not always produced a harmonious
sound.* (I could say the same of a number of philosophers and painters,
including, among the latter, Uccello, from painters of the past, and, in
the modern era, Seurat, Gustave Moreau, Matisse (in "La Musique," for
example), Derain, Picasso, (by far the most pure), Braque, Duchamp,
Picabia, Chirico (so admirable for so long), Klee, Man Ray, Max Ernst,
and, one so close to us, André Masson.)

But we, who have made no effort whatsoever to filter, who in our
works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes,
modest recording instruments who are not mesmerized by the drawings
we are making, perhaps we serve an even nobler cause. Thus do we
render with integrity the "talent" which has been lent to us. You might as
well speak of the talent of this platinum ruler, this mirror, this door,
and of the sky, if you like.

We do not have any talent; ask Philippe Soupault:

"Anatomical products of manufacture and low-income dwellings will
destroy the tallest cities."

Ask Roger Vitrac:

"No sooner had I called forth the marble-admiral than he turned on
his heel like a horse which rears at the sight of the North star and
showed me, in the plane of his two-pointed cocked hat, a region where I
was to spend my life."

Ask Paul Eluard:

"This is an oft-told tale that I tell, a famous poem that I reread:
I am leaning against a wall, with my verdant ears and my lips burned to a
crisp."

Ask Max Morise:

"The bear of the caves and his friend the bittern, the vol-au-vent
and his valet the wind, the Lord Chancellor with his Lady, the scarecrow
for sparrows and his accomplice the sparrow, the test tube and his
daughter the needle, this carnivore and his brother the carnival, the
sweeper and his monocle, the Mississippi and its little dog, the coral and
its jug of milk, the Miracle and its Good Lord, might just as well go and
disappear from the surface of the sea."

Ask Joseph Delteil:

"Alas! I believe in the virtue of birds. And a feather is all it
takes to make me die laughing."

Ask Louis Aragon:

"During a short break in the party, as the players were gathering
around a bowl of flaming punch, I asked a tree if it still had its red
ribbon."

And ask me, who was unable to keep myself from writing the serpentine,
distracting lines of this preface.

Ask Robert Desnos, he who, more than any of us, has perhaps got closest
to the Surrealist truth, he who, in his still unpublished works* (NOUVELLES
HÉBRIDES, DÉSORDRE FORMEL, DEUIL POUR DEUIL.) and in the course of the
numerous experiments he has been a party to, has fully justified the hope
I placed in Surrealism and leads me to believe that a great deal more will
still come of it. Desnos speaks Surrealist at will. His
extraordinary agility in orally following his thought is worth as much to
us as any number of splendid speeches which are lost, Desnos having better
things to do than record them. He reads himself like an open book, and
does nothing to retain the pages, which fly away in the windy wake of his
life.

Andre Breton

What is Surrealism?

At the beginning of the war
of 1870 (he was to die four months later, aged twenty-four), the author of
the Chants de Maldoror and of Poésies, Isidore Ducasse, better known by
the name of Comte de Lautréamont, whose thought has been of the very
greatest help and encouragement to myself and my friends throughout the
fifteen years during which we have succeeded in carrying a common
activity, made the following remark, among many others which were to
electrify us fifty years later: "At the hour in which I write, new tremors
are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is only a matter of
having the courage to face them.'' 1868-75: it is impossible, looking back
upon the past, to perceive an epoch so poetically rich, so victorious, so
revolutionary and so charged with distant meaning as that which stretches
from the separate publication of the Premier Chant de Maldoror to the
insertion in a letter to Ernest Delahaye of Rimbauld's last poem, Rêve,
which has not so far been included in his Complete Works. It is not an
idle hope to wish to see the works of Lautréamont and Rimbaud restored to
their correct historical background: the coming and the immediate results
of the war of 1870. Other and analogous cataclysms could not have failed
to rise out of that military and social cataclysm whose final episode was
to be the atrocious crushing of the Paris Commune; the last in date caught
many of us at the very age when Lautréamont and Rimbaud found themselves
thrown into the preceding one, and by way of revenge has had as its
consequence - and this is the new and important fact - the triumph of the
Bolshevik Revolution.

I should say that to people
socially and politically uneducated as we then were - we who, on one hand,
came for the most part from the petite-bourgeoisie, and on the other, were
all by vocation possessed with the desire to intervene upon the artistic
plane - the days of October, which only the passing of the years and the
subsequent appearance of a large number of works within the reach of all
were fully to illumine, could not there and then have appeared to turn so
decisive a page in history. We were, I repeat, ill-prepared and
ill-informed. Above all, we were exclusively preoccupied with a campaign
of systematic refusal, exasperated by the conditions under which, in such
an age, we were forced to live. But our refusal did not stop there; it was
insatiable and knew no bounds. Apart from the incredible stupidity of the
arguments which attempted to legitimize our participation in an enterprise
such as the war, whose issue left us completely indifferent, this refusal
was directed - and having been brought up in such a school, we are not
capable of changing so much that is no longer so directed - against the
whole series of intellectual, moral and social obligations that
continually and from all sides weigh down upon man and crush him.
Intellectually, it was vulgar rationalism and chop logic that more than
anything else formed the causes of our horror and our destructive impulse;
morally, it was all duties: religious, civic and of the family; socially,
it was work (did not Rimbaud say: "Jamais je ne travaillerai, ô flots de
feu!'' and also: "La main à plume vaut la main à charrue. Quel siècle à
mains! Je n'aurai jamais ma main!''). The more I think about it, the more
certain I become that nothing was to our minds worth saving, unless it
was... unless it was, at last "l'amour la poésie,'' to take the bright and
trembling title of one of Paul Eluard's books, "l'amour la poésie,''
considered as inseparable in their essence and as the sole good. Between
the negation of this good, a negation brought to its climax by the war,
and its full and total affirmation ("Poetry should be made by all, not
one''), the field was not, to our minds, open to anything but a Revolution
truly extended into all domains, improbably radical, to the highest degree
impractical and tragically destroying within itself the whole time the
feeling that it brought with it both of desirability and of absurdity.
Many of you, no doubt, would put this down to a certain youthful
exaltation and to the general savagery of the time; I must, however,
insist on this attitude, common to particular men and manifesting itself
at periods nearly half a century distant from one another. I should affirm
that in ignorance of this attitude one can form no idea of what surrealism
really stands for. This attitude alone can account, and very sufficiently
at that, for all the excesses that may be attributed to us but which
cannot be deplored unless one gratuitously supposes that we could have
started from any other point. The ill-sounding remarks, that are imputed
to us, the so-called inconsiderate attacks, the insults, the quarrels, the
scandals - all things that we are so much reproached with - turned up on
the same road as the surrealist poems. From the very beginning, the
surrealist attitude has had that in common with Lautréamont and Rimbaud
which once and for all binds our lot to theirs, and that is wartime
defeatism.

I am not afraid to say that this defeatism seems to be more relevant than
ever. "New tremors are running through the intellectual atmosphere; it is
only a matter of having the courage to face them.'' They are, in fact,
always running through the intellectual atmosphere: the problem of their
propagation and interpretation remains the same and, as far as we are
concerned, remains to be solved. But, paraphrasing Lautréamont, I cannot
refrain from adding that at the hour in which I speak, old and mortal
shivers are trying to substitute themselves for those which are the very
shivers of knowledge and of life. They come to announce a frightful
disease, a disease followed by the deprivation of all rights; it is only a
matter of having the courage to face them also. This disease is called
fascism.

Let us be careful today not to underestimate the peril: the shadow has
greatly advanced over Europe recently. Hitler, Dolfuss and Mussolini have
either drowned in blood or subjected to corporal humiliation everything
that formed the effort of generations straining towards a more tolerable
and more worthy form of existence. In capitalist society, hypocrisy and
cynicism have now lost all sense of proportion and are becoming more
outrageous every day. Without making exaggerated sacrifices to
humanitarianism, which always involves impossible reconciliation's and
truces to the advantage of the stronger, I should say that in this
atmosphere, thought cannot consider the exterior world without an
immediate shudder. Everything we know about fascism shows that it is
precisely the homologation of this state of affairs, aggravated to its
furthest point by the lasting resignation that it seeks to obtain from
those who suffer. Is not the evident role of fascism to re-establish for
the time being the tottering supremacy of finance-capital? Such a role is
of itself sufficient to make it worthy of all our hatred; we continue to
consider this feigned resignation as one of the greatest evils that can
possibly be inflicted upon beings of our kind, and those who would inflict
it deserve, in our opinion, to be beaten like dogs. Yet it is impossible
to conceal the fact that this immense danger is there, lurking at our
doors, that it has made its appearance within our walls, and that it would
be pure byzantinism to dispute too long, as in Germany, over the choice of
the barrier to be set up against it, when all the while, under several
aspects, it is creeping nearer and nearer to us. During the course of
taking various steps with a view to contributing, in so far as I am
capable, to the organization in Paris of the anti-fascist struggle, I have
noticed that already a certain doubt has crept into the intellectual
circles of the left as to the possibility of successfully combating
fascism, a doubt which has unfortunately infected even those elements whom
one might have thought it possible to rely on and who had come to the fore
in this struggle. Some of them have even begun to make excuses for the
loss of the battle already. Such dispositions seem to me to be so
dismaying that I should not care to be speaking here without first having
made clear my position in relation to them, or without anticipating a
whole series of remarks that are to follow, affirming that today, more
than ever before, the liberation of the mind, demands as primary
condition, in the opinion of the surrealists, the express aim of
surrealism, the liberation of man, which implies that we must struggle
with our fetters with all the energy of despair; that today more than ever
before the surrealists entirely rely for the bringing about of the
liberation of man upon the proletarian Revolution.

I now feel free to turn to the object of this pamphlet, which is to
attempt to explain what surrealism is. A certain immediate ambiguity
contained in the word surrealism, is, in fact, capable of leading one to
suppose that it designates I know not what transcendental attitude, while,
on the contrary it expresses - and always has expressed for us - a desire
to deepen the foundations of the real, to bring about an even clearer and
at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived
by the senses. The whole evolution of surrealism, from its origins to the
present day, which I am about to retrace, shows that our unceasing wish,
growing more and more urgent from day to day, has been at all costs to
avoid considering a system of thought as a refuge, to pursue our
investigations with eyes wide open to their outside consequences, and to
assure ourselves that the results of these investigations would be capable
of facing the breath of the street. At the limits, for many years past -
or more exactly, since the conclusion of what one may term the purely
intuitive epoch of surrealism (1919-25) - at the limits, I say, we have
attempted to present interior reality and exterior reality as two elements
in process of unification, or finally becoming one. This final unification
is the supreme aim of surrealism: interior reality and exterior reality
being, in the present form of society, in contradiction (and in this
contradiction we seethe very cause of man's unhappiness, but also the
source of his movement), we have assigned to ourselves the task of
confronting these two realities with one another on every possible
occasion, of refusing to allow the preeminence of the one over the other,
yet not of acting on the one and on the other both at once, for that would
be to suppose that they are less apart from one another than they are (and
I believe that those who pretend that they are acting on both
simultaneously are either deceiving us or are a prey to a disquieting
illusion); of acting on
these two realities not both at once, then, but one after the other, in a
systematic manner, allowing us to observe their reciprocal attraction and
interpenetration and to give to this interplay of forces all the extension
necessary for the trend of these two adjoining realities to become one and
the same thing.

As I have just mentioned in passing, I consider that one can distinguish
two epochs in the surrealist movement, of equal duration, from its origins
(1919, year of the publication of Champs Magnétiques) until today; a
purely intuitive epoch, and a reasoning epoch. The first can summarily be
characterized by the belief expressed during this time in the
all-powerfulness of thought, considered capable of freeing itself by means
of its own resources. This belief witnesses to a prevailing view that I
look upon today as being extremely mistaken, the view that thought is
supreme over matter. The definition of surrealism that has passed into the
dictionary, a definition taken from the Manifesto of 1924, takes account
only of this entirely idealist disposition and (for voluntary reasons of
simplification and amplification destined to influence in my mind the
future of this definition) does so in terms that suggest that I deceived
myself at the time in advocating the use of an automatic thought not only
removed from all control exercised by the reason but also disengaged from
"all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.'' It should at least have been
said: conscious aesthetic or moral preoccupations. During the period under
review, in the absence, of course, of all seriously discouraging exterior
events, surrealist activity remained strictly confined to its first
theoretical premise, continuing all the while to be the vehicle of that
total "non-conformism'' which, as we have seen, was the binding feature in
the coming together of those who took part in it, and the cause, during
the first few years after the war, of an uninterrupted series of
adhesions. No coherent political or social attitude, however, made its
appearance until 1925, that is to say (and it is important to stress
this), until the outbreak of the Moroccan war, which, re-arousing in us
our particular hostility to the way armed conflicts affect man, abruptly
placed before us the necessity of making a public protest. This protest,
which, under the title La Révolution d'Abord et Toujours (October 1925),
joined the name of the surrealists proper to those of thirty other
intellectuals, was undoubtedly rather confused ideologically; it none the
less marked the breaking away from a whole way of thinking; it none the
less created a precedent that was to determine the whole future direction
of the movement. Surrealist activity, faced with a brutal, revolting,
unthinkable fact, was forced to ask itself what were its proper resources
and to determine their limits; it was forced to adopt a precise attitude,
exterior to itself, in order to continue to face whatever exceeded these
limits. Surrealist activity at this moment entered into its reasoning
phase. It suddenly experienced the necessity of crossing over the gap that
separates absolute idealism from dialectical materialism. This necessity
made its appearance in so urgent a manner that we had to consider the
problem in the clearest possible light, with the result that for some
months we devoted our entire attention to the means of bringing about this
change of front once and for all. If I do not today feel any retrospective
embarrassment in explaining this change, that is because it seems to me
quite natural that surrealist thought, before coming to rest in
dialectical materialism and insisting, as today, on the supremacy of
matter over mind, should have been condemned to pass, in a few years,
through the whole historic development of modern thought. It came normally
to Marx through Hegel, just as it came normally to Hegel through Berkeley
and Hume. These latter influences offer a certain particularity in that,
contrary to certain poetic influences undergone in the same way, and
accommodated to those of the French materialists of the eighteenth
century, they yielded a residuum of practical action. To try and hide
these influences would be contrary to my desire to show that surrealism
has not been drawn up as an abstract system, that is to say, safeguarded
against all contradictions. It is also my desire to show how surrealist
activity, driven, as I have said, to ask itself what were its proper
resources, had in some way or another to reflect upon itself its
realization, in 1925, of its relative insufficiency; how surrealist
activity had to cease being content with the results (automatic texts, the
recital of dreams, improvised speeches, spontaneous poems, drawings and
actions) which it had originally planned; and how it came to consider
these first results as being simply so much material, starting from which
the problem of knowledge inevitably arose again under quite a new form.

As a living movement, that is to say a movement undergoing a constant
process of becoming and, what is more, solidly relying on concrete facts,
surrealism has brought together and is still bringing together diverse
temperaments individually obeying or resisting a variety of bents. The
determinant of their enduring or short-lived adherence is not to be
considered as a blind concession to an inert stock of ideas held in
common, but as a continuous sequence of acts which, propelling the doer to
more or less distant points, forces him for each fresh start to return to
the same starting-line. These exercises not being without peril, one man
may break a limb or - for which there is no precedent - his head, another
may peaceably submerge himself in a quagmire or report himself dying of
fatigue. Unable as yet to treat itself to an ambulance, surrealism simply
leaves these individuals by the wayside. Those who continue in the ranks
are aware of course of the casualties left behind them. But what of it?
The essential is always to look ahead, to remain sure that one has not
forfeited the burning desire for beauty, truth and justice, toilingly to
go onwards towards the discovery, one by one, of fresh landscapes, and to
continue doing so indefinitely and without coercion to the end, that
others may afterwards travel the same spiritual road, unhindered and in
all security. Penetration, to be sure, has not been as deep as one would
have wished. Poetically speaking, a few wild, or shall we say charming,
beasts whose cries fill the air and bar access to a domain as yet only
surmised, are still far from being exorcized. But for all that, the
piercing of the thicket would have proceeded less tortuously, and those
who are doing the pioneering would have acquitted themselves with
unabating tenacity in the service of the cause, if, between the beginning
and the end of the spectacle which they provide for themselves and would
be glad to provide for others, a change had not taken place.

In 1936, more than ever before, surrealism owes it to itself to defend the
postulate of the necessity of change. It is amusing, indeed, to see how
the more spiteful and silly of our adversaries affect to triumph whenever
they stumble on some old statement we may have made and which now sounds
more or less discordantly in the midst of others intended to render
comprehensible our present conduct. This insidious maneuver, which is
calculated to cast a doubt on our good faith, or at least on the
genuineness of our principles, can easily be defeated. The development of
surrealism throughout the decade of its existence is, we take it, a
function of the unrolling of historical realities as these may be speeded
up between the period of relief which follows the conclusion of a peace
and the fresh outbreak of war. It is also a function of the process of
seeking after new values in order to confirm or invalidate existing ones.
The fact that certain of the first participants in surrealist activity
have thrown in the sponge and have been discarded has brought about the
retiring from circulation of some ways of thinking and the putting into
circulation of others in which there were implicit certain general
dissents on the one hand and certain general assents on the other. Hence
it is that this activity has been fashioned by the events. At the present
moment, contrary to current biased rumor according to which surrealism
itself is supposed, in its cruelty of disposition, to have sacrificed
nearly all the blood first vivifying it, it is heartening to be able to
point out that it has never ceased to avail itself of the perfect teamwork
of René Crevel, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst, Benjamin Péret, Man Ray, Tristan
Tzara, and the present writer, all of whom can attest that from the
inception of the movement - which is also the date of our enlistment in it
- until now, the initial principle of their covenant has never been
violated. If there have occurred differences on some points, it was
essentially within the rhythmic scope of the integral whole, in itself a
least disputable element of objective value. The others, they whom we no
longer meet, can they say as much? They cannot, for the simple reason that
since they separated from us they have been incapable of achieving a
single concerted action that had any definite form of its own, and they
have confined themselves, instead, to a reaction against surrealism with
the greatest wastage to themselves - a fate always overtaking those who go
back on their past. The history of their apostasy and denials will
ultimately be read into the great limbo of human failings, without profit
to any observer - ideal yesterday, but real today - who, called upon to
make a pronouncement, will decide whether they or ourselves have brought
the more appreciable efforts to bear upon a rational solution of the many
problems surrealism has propounded.

Although there can be no question here of going through the history of the
surrealist movement - its history has been told many a time and sometimes
told fairly well; moreover, I prefer to pass on as quickly as possible to
the exposition of its present attitude - I think I ought briefly to
recall, for the benefit of those of you who were unaware of the fact, that
there is no doubt that before the surrealist movement properly so called,
there existed among the promoters of the movement and others who later
rallied round it, very active, not merely dissenting but also antagonistic
dispositions which, between 1915 and 1920, were willing to align
themselves under the signboard of Dada. Post-war disorder, a state of mind
essentially anarchic that guided that cycle's many manifestations, a
deliberate refusal to judge - for lack, it was said, of criteria - the
actual qualifications of individuals, and, perhaps, in the last analysis,
a certain spirit of negation which was making itself conspicuous, had
brought about a dissolution of the group as yet inchoate, one might say,
by reason of its dispersed and heterogeneous character, a group whose
germinating force has nevertheless been decisive and, by the general
consent of present-day critics, has greatly influenced the course of
ideas. It may be proper before passing rapidly - as I must - over this
period, to apportion by far the handsomest share to Marcel Duchamp
(canvases and glass objects still to be seen in New York), to Francis
Picabia (reviews "291'' and "391''), Jacques Vaché (Lettres de Guerre) and
Tristan Tzara (Twenty-five Poems, Dada Manifesto 1918).

Strangely enough, it was round a discovery of language that there was
seeking to organize itself in 1920 what - as yet on a basis of
confidential exchange - assumed the name of surrealism, a word fallen from
the lips of Apollinaire, which we had diverted from the rather general and
very confusing connotation he had given it. What was at first no more than
a new method of poetic writing broke away after several years from the
much too general theses which had come to be expounded in the Surrealist
Manifesto - Soluble Fish, 1924, the Second Manifesto adding others to
them, whereby the whole was raised to a vaster ideological plane; and so
there had to be revision.

In an article, "Enter the Mediums'', published in Littérature, 1922,
reprinted in Les Pas Perdus, 1924, and subsequently in the Surrealist
Manifesto, I explained the circumstance that had originally put us, my
friends and myself, on the track of the surrealist activity we still
follow and for which we are hopeful of gaining ever more numerous new
adherents in order to extend it further than we have so far succeeded in
doing. It reads: It was in 1919, in complete solitude and at the approach
of sleep, that my attention was arrested by sentences more or less
complete, which became perceptible to my mind without my being able to
discover (even by very
meticulous analysis) any possible previous volitional effort. One evening
in particular, as I was about to fall asleep, I became aware of a sentence
articulated clearly to a point excluding all possibility of alteration and
stripped of all quality of vocal sound; a curious sort of sentence which
came to me bearing - in sober truth - not a trace of any relation whatever
to any incidents I may at that time have been involved in; an insistent
sentence, it seemed to me, a sentence I might say, that knocked at the
window. I was prepared to pay no further attention to it when the organic
character of the sentence detained me. I was really bewildered.
Unfortunately, I am unable to remember the exact sentence at this
distance, but it ran approximately like this: "A man is cut in half by the
window.'' What made it plainer was the fact that it was accompanied by a
feeble visual representation of a man in the process of walking, but
cloven, at half his height, by a window perpendicular to the axis of his
body. Definitely, there was the form, re-erected against space, of a man
leaning out of a window. But the window following the man's locomotion, I
understood that I was dealing with an image of great rarity. Instantly the
idea came to me to use it as material for poetic construction. I had no
sooner invested it with that quality, than it had given place to a
succession of all but intermittent sentences which left me no less
astonished, but in a state, I would say, of extreme detachment.

Preoccupied as I still was at that time with Freud, and familiar with his
methods of investigation, which I had practiced occasionally upon the sick
during the War, I resolved to obtain from myself what one seeks to obtain
from patients, namely a monologue poured out as rapidly as possible, over
which the subject's critical faculty has no control - the subject himself
throwing reticence to the winds - and which as much as possible represents
spoken thought. It seemed and still seems to me that the speed of thought
is no greater than that of words, and hence does not exceed the flow of
either tongue or pen. It was in such circumstances that, together with
Philippe Soupault, whom I had told about my first ideas on the subject, I
began to cover sheets of paper with writing, feeling a praiseworthy
contempt for whatever the literary result might be. Ease of achievement
brought about the rest. By the end of the first day of the experiment we
were able to read to one another about fifty pages obtained in this manner
and to compare the results we had achieved. The likeness was on the whole
striking. There were similar faults of construction, the same hesitant
manner, and also, in both cases, an illusion of extraordinary verve, much
emotion, a considerable assortment of images of a quality such as we
should never have been able to obtain in the normal way of writing, a very
special sense of the picturesque, and, here and there, a few pieces of out
and out buffoonery. The only differences which our two texts presented
appeared to me to be due essentially to our respective temperaments,
Soupault's being less static than mine, and, if he will allow me to make
this slight criticism, to his having scattered about at the top of certain
pages - doubtlessly in a spirit of mystification - various words under the
guise of titles. I must give him credit, on the other hand, for having
always forcibly opposed the least correction of any passage that did not
seem to me to be quite the thing. In that he was most certainly right.

It is of course difficult in these cases to appreciate at their just value
the various elements in the result obtained; one may even say that it is
entirely impossible to appreciate them at a first reading. To you who may
be writing them, these elements are, in appearance, as strange as to
anyone else, and you are yourself naturally distrustful of them.
Poetically speaking, they are distinguished chiefly by a very high degree
of immediate absurdity, the peculiar quality of that absurdity being, on
close examination, their yielding to whatever is most admissible and
legitimate in the world: divulgation of a given number of facts and
properties on the whole not less objectionable than the others.

The word "surrealism'' having thereupon become descriptive of the
generalizable undertaking to which we had devoted ourselves, I thought it
indispensable, in 1924, to define this word once and for all:

SURREALISM, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which it is intended to
express, verbally, in writing, or by other means, the real process of
thought. Thought's dictation, in the absence of all control exercised by
the reason and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.

ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism rests in the belief in the superior reality of
certain forms of association neglected heretofore; in the omnipotence of
the dream and in the disinterested play of thought. It tends definitely to
do away with all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for
them in the solution of the principal problems of life. Have professed
absolute surrealism: Messrs. Aragon, Baron, Boiffard, Breton, Carrive,
Crevel, Delteil, Desnos, Eluard, Gérard, Limbour, Malkine, Morise, Naville,
Noll, Péret, Picon, Soupault, Vitrac.

These till now appear to be the only ones.... Were one to consider their
output only superficially, a goodly number of poets might well have passed
for surrealists, beginning with Dante and Shakespeare at his best. In the
course of many attempts I have made towards an analysis of what, under
false pretences, is called genius, I have found nothing that could in the
end be attributed to any other process than this.

There followed an enumeration that will gain, I think, by being clearly
set out thus:

They were not always surrealists - on this I insist - in the sense that
one can disentangle in each of them a number of preconceived notions to
which - very naïvely! - they clung. And they clung to them so because they
had not heard the surrealist voice, the voice that exhorts on the eve of
death and in the roaring storm, and because they were unwilling to
dedicate themselves to the task of no more than orchestrating the score
replete with marvelous things. They were proud instruments; hence the
sounds they produced were not always harmonious sounds.

We, on the contrary, who have not given ourselves to processes of
filtering, who through the medium of our work have been content to be the
silent receptacles of so many echoes, modest registering machines that are
not
hypnotized by the pattern that they trace, we are perhaps serving a yet
much nobler cause. So we honestly give back the talent lent to us. You may
talk of the "talent'' of this yard of platinum, of this mirror, of this
door and of this sky, if you wish.

We have no talent. . . .

The Manifesto also contained a certain number of practical recipes,
entitled: "Secrets of the Magic Surrealist Art,'' such as the following:

Written Surrealist Composition or First and Last Draft.

Having settled down in some spot most conducive to the mind's
concentration upon itself, order writing material to be brought to you.
Let your state of mind be as passive and receptive as possible. Forget
your genius, talents, as well as the genius and talents of others. Repeat
to yourself that literature is pretty well the sorriest road that leads to
everywhere. Write quickly without any previously chosen subject, quickly
enough not to dwell on, and not to be tempted to read over, what you have
written. The first sentence will come of itself; and this is
self-evidently true, because there is never a moment but some sentence
alien to our conscious thought clamors for outward expression. It is
rather difficult to speak of the sentence to follow, since it doubtless
comes in for a share of our conscious activity and so the other sentences,
if it is conceded that the writing of the first sentence must have
involved even a minimum of consciousness. But that should in the long run
matter little, because therein precisely lies the greatest interest in the
surrealist exercise. Punctuation of course necessarily hinders the stream
of absolute continuity which preoccupies us. But you should particularly
distrust the prompting whisper. If through a fault ever so trifling there
is a forewarning of silence to come, a fault let us say, of inattention,
break off unhesitatingly the line that has become too lucid. After the
word whose origin seems suspect you should place a letter, any letter, l
for example, always the letter l, and restore the arbitrary flux by making
that letter the initial of the word to follow.

I believe that the real interest of that book - there was no lack of
people who were good enough to concede interest, for which no particular
credit is due to me because I have no more than given expression to
sentiments shared with friends, present and former - rests only
subordinately on the formula above given. It is rather confirmatory of a
turn of thought which, for good or ill, is peculiarly distinctive of our
time. The defense originally attempted of that turn of thought still seems
valid to me in what follows:

We still live under the reign of logic, but the methods of logic are
applied nowadays only to the resolution of problems of secondary in
tersest. The absolute rationalism which is still the fashion does not
permit consideration of any facts but those strictly relevant to our
experience. Logical ends, on the other hand, escape us. Needless to say
that even experience has had limits assigned to it. It revolves in a cage
from which it becomes more and more difficult to release it. Even
experience is dependent on immediate utility, and common sense is its
keeper. Under color of civilization, under pretext of progress, all that
rightly or wrongly may be regarded as fantasy or
superstition has been banished from the mind, all uncustomary searching
after truth has been proscribed. It is only by what must seem sheer luck
that there has recently been brought to light an aspect of mental life -
to my belief by far the most important - with which it was supposed that
we no longer had any concern. All credit for these discoveries must go to
Freud. Based on these discoveries a current of opinion is forming that
will enable the explorer of the human mind to continue his investigations,
justified as he will be in taking into account more than mere summary
realities. The imagination is perhaps on the point of reclaiming its
rights. If the depths of our minds harbor strange forces capable of
increasing those on the surface, or of successfully contending with them,
then it is all in our interest to canalize them, to canalize them first in
order to submit them later, if necessary, to the control of the reason.
The analysts themselves have nothing to lose by such a proceeding. But it
should be observed that there are no means designed a priori for the
bringing about of such an enterprise, that until the coming of the new
order it might just as well be considered the affair of poets and
scientists, and that its success will not depend on the more or less
capricious means that will be employed. . . .

Interesting in a different way from the future of surrealist techniques
(theatrical, philosophical, scientific, critical) appears to me the
application of surrealism to action. Whatever reservations I might be
inclined to make with
regard to responsibility in general, I should quite particularly like to
know how the first misdemeanors whose surrealist character is indubitable
will be judged. When surrealist methods extend from writing to action,
there will
certainly arise the need of a new morality to take the place of the
current one, the cause of all our woes.

The Manifesto of Surrealism has improved on the Rimbaud principle that the
poet must turn seer. Man in general is going to be summoned to manifest
through life those new sentiments which the gift of vision will so
suddenly have placed within his reach. . . .

Surrealism then was securing expression in all its purity and force. The
freedom it possesses is a perfect freedom in the sense that it recognizes
no limitations exterior to itself. As it was said on the cover of the
first issue of La Révolution Surréaliste, "it will be necessary to draw up
a new declaration of the Rights of Man.'' The concept of surreality,
concerning which quarrels
have been sought with us repeatedly and which it was attempted to turn
into a metaphysical or mystic rope to be placed afterwards round our
necks, lends itself no longer to misconstruction, nowhere does it declare
itself opposed to the need of transforming the world which henceforth will
more and more definitely yield to it.

As I said in the Manifesto:

I believe in the future transmutation of those two seemingly contradictory
states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality,
so to speak. I am looking forward to its consummation, certain that I
shall never
share in it, but death would matter little to me could I but taste the joy
it will yield ultimately.

After years of endeavor and perplexities, when a variety of opinions had
disputed amongst themselves the direction of the craft in which a number
of persons of unequal ability and varying powers of resistance had
originally embarked together, the surrealist idea recovered in the Second
Manifesto all the brilliancy of which events had vainly conspired to
despoil it. It should be
emphasized that the First Manifesto of 1924 did no more than sum up the
conclusions we had drawn during what one may call the heroic epoch of
surrealism, which stretches from 1919 to 1923. The concerted elaboration
of the first automatic texts and our excited reading of them, the first
results obtained by Max Ernst in the domain of "collage'' and of painting,
the practice of surrealist "speaking'' during the hypnotic experiments
introduced among us by René Crevel and repeated every evening for over a
year, uncontrovertibly mark the decisive stages of surrealist exploration
during this first phase. After that, up till the taking into account of
the social aspect of the problem round about 1925 (though not formally
sanctioned until 1930), surrealism began to find itself a prey to
characteristic wranglings. These wranglings account very clearly for the
expulsion orders and tickets-of-leave which, as we went along, we had to
deal out to certain of our companions of the first and second hour. Some
people have quite gratuitously concluded from this that we are apt to
overestimate personal questions. During the last ten years, surrealism has
almost unceasingly been obliged to defend itself against deviations to the
right and to the left. On the one hand we have had to struggle against the
will of those who would maintain surrealism on a purely speculative level
and treasonably transfer it on to an artistic and literary plane (Artaud,
Desnos, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Vitrac) at the cost of all the hope for
subversion we have placed in it; on the other, against the will of those
who would place it on a purely practical basis, available at any moment to
be sacrificed to an ill-conceived political militancy (Naville, Aragon) -
at the cost, this time, of what constitutes the originality and reality of
its researches, at the cost of the autonomous risk that it has to run.
Agitated though it was, the epoch that separates the two Manifestos was
none the less a rich one, since it saw the publication of so many works in
which the vital principles of surrealism were amply accounted for. . . .

It should be pointed out that in a number of declarations in La Révolution
et les Intellectuels. Que peuvent faire les surréalistes? (1926), [Pierre
Naville] demonstrated the utter vanity of intellectual bickerings in the
face of the human exploitation which results from the wage-earning system.
These declarations gave rise amongst us to considerable anxiety and, at
tempting for the first time to justify surrealism's social implications, I
desired to put an end to it in Légitime Défense. This pamphlet set out to
demonstrate that there is no fundamental antinomy in the basis of
surrealist thought. In reality, we are faced with two problems, one of
which is the problem raised, at the beginning of the twentieth century, by
the discovery of the relations between the conscious and the unconscious.
That was how the problem chose to present itself to us. We were the first
to apply to its resolution a particular method, which we have not ceased
to consider both the most suitable and the most likely to be brought to
perfection; there is no reason why we should renounce it. The other
problem we are faced with is that of the social action we should pursue.
We consider that this action has its own method in dialectical
materialism, and we can all the less afford to ignore this action since, I
repeat, we hold the liberation of man to be the sine qua non condition of
the liberation of the mind, and we can expect this liberation of man to
result only from the proletarian Revolution. These two problems are
essentially distinct and we deplore their becoming confused by not
remaining so. There is good reason, then, to take up a stand against all
attempts to weld them together and, more especially, against the urge to
abandon all such researches as ours in order to devote ourselves to the
poetry and art of propaganda. Surrealism, which has been the object of
brutal and repeated summonses in this respect, now feels the need of
making some kind of counter-attack. Let me recall the fact that its very
definition holds that it must escape, in its written manifestations, or
any others, from all control exercised by the reason. Apart from the
puerility of wishing to bring a supposedly Marxist control to bear on the
immediate aspect of such manifestations, this control cannot be envisaged
in principle. And how ill-boding does this distrust seem, coming as it
does from men who declare themselves Marxists, that is to say possessed
not only of a strict line in revolutionary matters, but also of a
marvelously open mind and an insatiable curiosity!

This brings us to the eve of the Second Manifesto. These objections had to
be put an end to, and for that purpose it was indispensable that we should
proceed to liquidate certain individualist elements amongst us, more or
less openly hostile to one another, whose intentions did not, in the final
analysis, appear as irreproachable, nor their motives as disinterested, as
might have
been desired. An important part of the work was devoted to a statement of
the reasons which moved surrealism to dispense for the future with certain
collaborators. It was attempted, on the same occasion, to complete the
specific method of creation proposed six years earlier, and thoroughly to
tidy up surrealist ideas. . . .

From 1930 until today the history of surrealism is that of successful
efforts to restore to it its proper becoming by gradually removing from it
every trace both of political opportunism and of artistic opportunism. The
review La Révolution Surréaliste, (12 issues) has been succeeded by
another, Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution (6 issues). Owing
particularly to influences brought to bear by new elements, surrealist
experimenting. which had for too long been erratic, has been unreservedly
resumed; its perspectives and its aims have been made perfectly clear; I
may say that it has not ceased to be carried on in a continuous and
enthusiastic manner. This experimenting has regained momentum under the
master-impulse given to it by Salvador Dali, whose exceptional interior
"boiling'' has been for surrealism, during the whole of this period, an
invaluable ferment. As Guy Mangeot has very rightly pointed out in his
History of Surrealism . . . Dali has endowed surrealism with an instrument
of primary importance, in particular the paranoiac-critical method, which
has immediately shown itself capable of being applied with equal success
to painting, poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical surrealist
objects, to fashions, to sculpture and even, if necessary, to all manner
of exegesis.

He first announced his convictions to us in La Femme Visible (1930):

I believe the moment is at hand when, by a paranoiac and active advance of
the mind, it will be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other
passive states) to systematize confusion and thus to help to discredit
completely the world of reality.

In order to cut short all possible misunderstandings, it should perhaps be
said: "immediate'' reality.

Paranoia uses the external world in order to assert its dominating idea
and has the disturbing characteristic of making others accept this idea's
reality. The reality of the external world is used for illustration and
proof, and so
comes to serve the reality of our mind.

Surrealism, starting fifteen years ago with a discovery that seemed only
to involve poetic language, has spread like wildfire, on pursuing its
course, not only in art but in life. It has provoked new states of
consciousness and overthrown the walls beyond which it was immemorially
supposed to be impossible to see; it has - as is being more and more
generally recognized - modified the sensibility, and taken a decisive step
towards the unification of the personality, which it found threatened by
an ever more profound dissociation. Without attempting to judge what
direction it will ultimately take, for the lands it fertilizes as it flows
are those of surprise itself, I should like to draw your attention to the
fact that its most recent advance is producing a fundamental crisis of the
"object.'' It is essentially upon the object that surrealism has thrown
most light in recent years. Only the very close examination of the many
recent speculations to which the object has publicly given rise (the
enteric object, the object functioning symbolically, the real and virtual
object, the moving but silent object, the phantom object, the discovered
object, etc.), can give one a proper grasp of the experiments that
surrealism is engaged in now. In order to continue to understand the
movement, it is indispensable to focus one's attention on this point.

I must crave your indulgence for speaking so technically, from the inside.
But there could be no question of concealing any aspect of the persuasions
to which surrealism has been and is still exposed. I say that there exists
a lyrical element that conditions for one part the psychological and moral
structure of human society, that has conditioned it at all times and that
will
continue to condition it. This lyrical element has until now, even though
in spite of them, remained the fact and the sole fact of specialists. In
the state of extreme tension to which class antagonisms have led the
society to which we belong and which we tend with all our strength to
reject, it is natural and it is fated that this solicitation should
continue, that it should assume for us a thousand faces, imploring,
tempting and eager by turns. It is not within our power, it would be
unworthy of our historic role to give way to this solicitation. By
surrealism we intend to account for nothing less than the manner in which
it is possible today to make use of the magnificent and overwhelming
spiritual legacy that has been handed down to us. We have accepted this
legacy from the past, and surrealism can well say that the use to which it
has been put has been to turn it to the routing of capitalist society. I
consider that for that purpose it was and is still necessary for us to
stand where we are, to beware against breaking the thread of our
researches and to continue these researches, not as literary men and
artists, certainly, but rather as chemists and the various other kinds of
technicians. To pass on to the poetry and art called (doubtless in
anticipation) proletarian: No. The forces we have been able to bring
together and which for fifteen years we have never found lacking, have
arrived at a particular point of application: the question is not to know
whether this point of application is the best, but simply to point out
that the application of our forces at this point has given us up to an
activity that has proved itself valuable and fruitful on the plane on
which it was undertaken and has also been of a kind to engage us more and
more on the revolutionary plane. What it is essential to realize is that
no other activity could have produced such rich results, nor could any
other similar activity have been so effective in combating the present
form of society. On that point we have history on our side.

A comrade, Claude Cahun, in a striking pamphlet published recently: Les
Paris Sont Ouverts, a pamphlet that attempts to predict the future of
poetry by taking account both of its own laws and of the social bases of
its existence, takes Aragon to task for the lack of rigor in his present
position (I do not think anyone can contest the fact that Aragon's poetry
has perceptibly weakened since he abandoned surrealism and undertook to
place him self directly at the service of the proletarian cause, which
leads one to suppose that such an undertaking has defeated him and is
proportionately more or less unfavorable to the Revolution).... It is of
particular interest that the author of Les Paris Sont Ouverts has taken
the opportunity of expressing himself from the "historic'' point of view.
His appreciation is as follows:

The most revolutionary experiment in poetry under the capitalist regime
having been incontestably, for France and perhaps for Europe the
Dadaist-surrealist experiment, in that it has tended to destroy all the
myths about art that for centuries have permitted the ideologic as well as
economic exploitation of painting, sculpture, literature, etc. (e.g. the
frottages of Max Ernst, which, among other things, have been able to upset
the scale of values of art-critics and experts, values based chiefly on
technical perfection, personal touch and the lastingness of the materials
employed), this experiment can and should serve the cause of the
liberation of the proletariat. It is only when the proletariat has become
aware of the myths on which capitalist culture depends, when they have
become aware of what these myths and this culture mean for them and have
destroyed them, that they will be able to pass on to their own proper
development. The positive lesson of this negating experiment, that is to
say its transfusion among the proletariat, constitutes the only valid
revolutionary poetic propaganda.

Surrealism could not ask for anything better. Once the cause of the
movement is understood, there is perhaps some hope that, on the plane of
revolutionary militantism proper, our turbulence, our small capacity for
adaptation, until now, to the necessary rules of a party (which certain
people have thought proper to call our "blanquism''), may be excused us.
It is only too certain that an activity such as ours, owing to its
particularization, cannot be pursued within the limits of any one of the
existing revolutionary organizations: it would be forced to come to a halt
on the very threshold of that organization. If we are agreed that such an
activity has above all tended to detach the intellectual creator from the
illusions with which bourgeois society has sought to surround him, I for
my part can only see in that tendency a further reason for continuing our
activity.

None the less, the right that we demand and our desire to make use of it
depend, as I said at the beginning, on our remaining able to continue our
investigations without having to reckon, as for the last few months we
have had to do, with a sudden attack from the forces of criminal
imbecility. Let it be clearly understood that for us, surrealists, the
interests of thought can not cease to go hand in hand with the interests
of the working class, and that all attacks on liberty, all fetters on the
emancipation of the working class and all armed attacks on it cannot fail
to be considered by us as attacks on thought likewise. I repeat, the
danger is far from having been removed. The surrealists cannot be accused
of having been slow to recognize the fact, since, on the very next day
after the first fascist coup in France, it was they amongst the
intellectual circles who had the honor of taking the initiative in sending
out an Appel à la lutte, which appeared on February 10th, 1934, furnished
with twenty-four signatures. You may rest assured, comrades, that they
will not confine themselves, that already they have not confined
themselves, to this single act.

Last issue of La Révolution Surréaliste1929

Second Manifesto of Surrealism

(1929)

We combat, in whatever form they may appear,
poetic indifference, the distraction of art,
scholarly research, pure speculation; we want nothing whatever to do with
those, either large or small, who use their minds as
they would a savings bank. All the forsaken
acquaintances, all the abdications, all the betrayals in the book will not
prevent us from putting an end to this damn nonsense. It is noteworthy,
moreover, that when they are left to their own devices, and to nothing
else, the people who one day made it necessary for us to do without them
have
straightway lost their footing, have been immediately
forced to resort to the most miserable expedients in order to reingratiate
themselves with the defenders of law and order, all proud
partisans of leveling via the head. This isbecause
unflagging fidelity to the commitments of Surreal-ism
presupposes a disinterestedness, a contempt for risk, a
refusal to compromise, of which very few men prove, in the long run, to be
capable. Were there to remain not a single one, from
among all those who were the first to measure
by its standards their chance for significance and their
desire for truth, yet would Surrealism continue to live. In any event, it is
too late for the seed not to sprout and grow
in infinite abundance in the human field, with fear and the other
varieties of weeds that must prevail over all. This
is in fact why I had promised myself, as the preface for the new edition
of the Manifesto
of Surrealism (1929)
indicates, to abandon silently to their sad fate a certain number of
individuals who, in my opinion, had given themselves
enough credit: this was the case for Messrs.Artaud,
Carrive,Delteil,
Gérard,
Limbour, Masson,Soupault,
and
Vitrac,
cited in the Manifesto (1924),
and for several others since. The first of these gentlemen
having been so brazen as to complain about it, I have decided to
reconsider my intentions on this subject:

"There is," writes M. Artaud
to the Intransigeant,
on
September 1o, 1929, "there is
in the article about the Manifesto of
Surrealism which appeared
in
l'Intran last August
24,
a
sentence which awakens too many things: 'M. Breton has not judged it
necessary to make any corrections —especially of names—in this new edition
of his work, and this is all to his credit, but the rectifications are
made by themselves.' " That M. Breton calls upon honor to judge a certain
number of people to whom the above-named rec­tifications apply is a matter
involving a sectarian morality with which only a literary minority was
hitherto infected. But we must leave to the Surrealists these games of
little papers. Moreover, anyone who was involved in the affair of The Dream
a year ago is hardly in a position to talk about honor.

Far be it from me to debate with the signatory of this letter the very
precise meaning I understand by the term "honor." That an actor, looking
for lucre and notoriety, undertakes to stage a sumptuous production of a
play by one Strindberg
to which he himself attaches not thhe
slightest importance, would of course be neither here nor there to me were
it not for the fact that this actor had upon oc­casion claimed to be a man
of thought, of anger, of blood, were he not the same person who, in
certain pages of La
Révolution surréaliste,
burned, if we can believe his words, to burn everything, who claimed that
he expected nothing save from "this cry of the mind which turns back
toward itself fully determined desperately to break its restraining
bonds." Alas! that was for him a role, like any other; he was "staging"
Strindberg's The Dream,
having heard that the
Swedish ambassador would pay
(M. Artaud knows that I can prove what I say),
and it cannot escape him that that is a judgment of the moral value of his
undertaking; but never mind. It is M. Artaud, whom I will always see in my
mind's eye flanked by two cops, at the door of the Alfred Jarry Theatre,
sicking twenty others on the only friends he admitted having as lately as
the night before, having previously negotiated their arrests at the
commis­sariat, it is M. Artaud, naturally, who finds me out of place
speaking of honor.

Aragon and I were able to
note, by the reception given our critical collaboration in the special
number of Varietés, "Le Surréalisme en 1929," that the lack of inhi­bition
that we feel in appraising, from day to day, the de­gree of moral
qualification of various people, the ease with which Surrealism, at the
first sign of compromise, prides itself in bidding a fond farewell to this
person or that, is less than ever to the liking of a few journalistic
jerks, for whom the dignity of man is at the very most a subject for
derisive laughter. Has it really ever occurred to anyone to ask as much of
people in the domain—aside from a few romantic exceptions, suicides and
others—here­tofore the least closely watched! Why should we go on playing
the role of those who are fed up and disgusted? A policeman, a few gay
dogs, two or three pen pimps, several mentally unbalanced persons, a
cretin, to whose number no one would mind our adding a few sensible,
stable, and upright souls who could be termed energumens: is this not the
making of an amusing, innocuous team, a faithful replica of life, a team
of men paid piecework, winning on points?

SHIT.»

Le "Mur Breton"
Assemblage
1922-1966

Andre Breton

Andre Breton’s Pompidou-reconstituted
wall—le "Mur Breton"

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